Real Snow Whites: two women are vying for the role of the prototype heroine (10 photos)

The fairy tale, play, film, cartoon about the story of Snow White is instructive and touching. But it turns out that the authors borrowed the idea from real life.





Aristocrat Margareta



Researcher Eckhart Sander came to the conclusion that the prototype of the main character was the German aristocrat Margareta von Waldeck. After the death of her mother, her father remarried and sent the girl, who grew up to be an amazing beauty, to live with relatives in Brussels.

Margareta ended up at the court of the future King of Spain, Philip II, and a romance broke out between the young people. However, the young man’s family did not accept her. It was during this period that the girl wrote to her father that she was rapidly losing her health. And she died when she was only 21 years old. Waldeck's notes contain suggestions that the unwanted bride was poisoned by someone from the entourage of the future monarch. This is evidenced by the daughter’s difficult-to-understand “trembling” handwriting.





The father and stepmother were never charged. But their guilt, albeit indirect, is there, since they used the girl as a tool in achieving their own ambitions and strengthening their position through marriage with the ruler. At the same time, they refused the worthy groom who asked for Margareta’s hand in marriage.



Around the same period, a strange old man was caught in the outskirts of the city, who was treating children with poisoned apples. There was no connection between the death of the girl and the craft of the elderly psycho, but the Brothers Grimm used this moment in the fairy tale.

And gnomes are not fairy-tale people at all, but children. The girl's father owned a mine. And the use of child labor was common at that time.

Princess Mary



The second prototype of Snow White is the real Princess Maria Sophia von Erthal, born in 1725 in the small German town of Lohr am Main. There is much less information about her life, but one detail definitely moved into the fairy tale - the magic mirror.

The girl really had a stepmother. The woman was pretty and loved to sit in front of the mirror that her husband gave her and praise herself.



The same mirror

It seems incredible for the time, but it is believed that the mirror contained a secret and somehow reflected the voice of the speaker, working as an echo. And the stepmother raised her self-esteem in this way.

The mirror has been preserved and is in the Spessart Museum, and visitors can even examine it. True, the “talking” mechanism failed.



Nobody poisoned Maria, and she died at a very advanced age for that time, about 70 years old. Due to hostility on the part of her stepmother or for some other reasons, the girl ran away from home and found shelter with miners who worked in a silver mine. And it was they who were transformed into gnomes in the fairy tale, since the mines were so low that working in them forced people to bend over. And this was reflected in the condition of the skeleton and growth.



Miners. Photo from the museum

When her father and stepmother died, she returned from the hut of her little benefactors to the castle. Where she lived until the end of her life. There were rumors that the princess was not particularly pious. And some miners, despite their height, were quite attractive young men. At least von Erthal didn’t get married.



A definite confirmation of this version is the fact that after the death of Mary’s mother in childbirth, many children, about a dozen, were left in the hands of the widower. And none of the brothers and sisters ran away from home, which indicates a relatively prosperous life of the family. At the beginning of the 19th century, the church in Bamberg, where the princess was buried after her death, collapsed, and the grave of the Snow White prototype was lost.



The same tombstone

But when the authorities came up with the idea of ​​opening a new tourist route, a tombstone strangely emerged from oblivion. It is understandable; what tourist would not want to ride along the roads of fairy tales, listening to the story about the life of the real Snow White.